As the craftsmanship of mass-produced furniture declines and the price of antique furniture rises, many would-be purchasers of fine furniture are starting the hobby of building their own. The hobby of woodworking, like most hobbies, requires many tools. Some of these tools, like the hammer and saw, are generally found in a typical toolbox, while others, like the table router, are exclusively bought and used by woodworkers.
The conventional table router is used to cut decorative edges and grooves into work pieces by providing a table surface to support a work piece and a router bit to cut the work piece. The router bit, either protruding up from a hole in the table or down from an arm above the table, cuts a specific shape upon contact with the work piece. There are currently hundreds of different shapes of router bits on the market, each cutting a slightly different shape.
Since the router bit is mounted in a fixed position in the conventional table router relative to the work piece, each router bit can only cut one specific shape in the work piece. Further, since woodworkers do not generally desire to be limited to a certain shape, they are inclined to buy dozens of shapes to meet their needs, resulting in significant expenditure of money and storage space.
In addition to cutting straight edges and grooves, the conventional table router can also be used to cut curved edges and grooves into work pieces. This process is typically accomplished by moving the work piece in an arcuate path guided by a template. A significant difficulty arises, however, when a woodworker wishes to create a curved work piece with a constant radius, or with multiple cuts along the same piece, like one could imagine in a curved crown molding. In these situations, the quality of the curved cuts is dependent on the precision of the template and the skill of the artisan.
Although curved cuts can be made by a skilled artisan with time and patience, a lesser skilled artisan would find the task extremely difficult. Thus, because of the need for multiple bit pieces and their inherent limitations with curved work pieces, the conventional table routers in the art can be expensive, time-consuming, and imprecise.